Night Written in the Stars
by Yaji's Girl
Summary: Chi-Chi realizes on their wedding night that Goku may not be the perfect husband he's cracked up to be.


**It's a little longer and far more generic than I usually write, though I hope you enjoy Goku and Chi-Chi's wedding night, the only couple's wedding night that could fairly be rated K+. This takes place right after the events of Dragon Ball, and it may be a stretch to call it Dragon Ball Z, though I see no reason not to. Dedicated to the readers of _Finding Rubble from Rubies_ who are all so anxious to see a happy ending with these two.  
**

After their wedding outside of Ox King's castle, saved from a disastrous fire just days before, Goku took Chi-Chi to his old home in the woods, the couple riding on his yellow Flying Nimbus. Chi-Chi leaned against her new husband, her hands clinging on to his shoulders as her white wedding dress flapped behind them with the wind. Goku had his eyes furrowed, unable to comprehend just what being married really meant. But Chi-Chi's eyes were dreamy as she imagined her new life, one in which she could serve as the perfect wife. There would be no more dreaming of what being married would be like, because that fantasy had become a reality. She couldn't hold back her smile as she pressed her cheek to Goku's back, forcing a wince out of the man.

Whatever being married meant, he hoped that Chi-Chi knew what they had both gotten themselves into. He knew that he was entitled to live with her and, having lived under the same roof as Launch for long enough, have her cook meals for him, but he still couldn't be certain of why Chi-Chi had made a huge fuss over all of this. He didn't feel any different. There were no remarkable changes taking place, marking him a different man than he had been just a day ago. But, he reasoned, women were strange. He had long ago given up any hope of trying to understand just what went on in their minds.

The pair traveled for hours, having to stop every once and a while for rest stops. Their whole trip was spent simply thinking, few words exchanged between the two. Chi-Chi was lost in her dreams of her future life, and Goku was busy contemplating just what being married meant. By the time they had reached the tiny hut in the woods, the one that Goku hadn't seen in many years, the sun was already setting.

The Nimbus came to a complete stop just in front of the small house, and Goku jumped off, pulling Chi-Chi along with him. She let out a startled yelp as the two approached the ornate building, just large enough for the couple. With a sigh, his hand clasped in her's, he announced, "Well, this is it."

Chi-Chi brought her other hand up to her cheek, her makeup already disturbed from their gusty trip. She stepped forth, placing a slipper on the stony pathway invaded by weeds, her eyes slowly examining the house from the bottom up. It certainly did need another coat of paint, and judging by the jungle of a yard, it was evident that it had been left uninhabited for years. But Chi-Chi was an optimist with her husband around, and she wouldn't let such minor details ruin her wedding night. She simply placed a gloved hand to her waist after knocking her veil out of her face, saying, "It'll take some work, but I like it."

Goku grinned as he led her from the front yard inside, opening the door for her. To her disappointment, the single-roomed building looked even smaller from the inside, having just enough room for a cot, table, and makeshift kitchen. And to make matters worse, as she stumbled through the dark room, she ran into a cluster of cobwebs. She sputtered a little and knocked them away as Goku looked around, as if seeing the place for the first time. It certainly brought memories back of the times he and his Grandpa Gohan had enjoyed together, learning how to survive until that monster came and crushed him. The thought stole from the smile on his face, but it returned in full as he turned back to Chi-Chi, asking, "How is it?"

He was clueless as to the struggle Chi-Chi was having, wondering whether to tell her newly-wed husband the truth or not. Though she decided to ignore his question to save his feelings, instead inquring, "Is there a bathroom in here? I could really use a mirror."

Goku only shook his head, a mischievous grin flashing on his face. Chi-Chi's shoulders visibly dropped in disappointment. No bathroom? Then that meant... "So there's no toilet?"

"Nope!" Goku replied after plopping down on the hammock he used to sleep on, his feet resting on the floor. He didn't notice Chi-Chi's look of horror as he explained, "My Grandpa Gohan and I used to just go in the bush just outside. Do you want me to show you where to-"

"Goku!" Chi-Chi exclaimed, already exasperated. That was something to ruin her honeymoon. She didn't care if she was married to the man or not, whether she was in the city or in the middle of a secluded forest, but she refused to use a bush as a toilet. It was completely uncivilized, something she just couldn't cope with. Goku finally recognized the dismay in her tone as she snapped, her hands on her hips, "Well, our first order of business will be to make a hole for a toilet, though I guess that will have to wait 'til morning."

She sighed, pulling her white gloves off of her hands and sticking them by her side, held by her arm. Then she wiped the table off with her bare hand, a billow of dust rising and forcing a sneeze out of her. Goku watched with interest as she carefully laid her gloves down on the table, hardly satisfied with the conditions of the hut. He couldn't believe that she wouldn't just use the bush outside - it was convenient, and it was far enough away so that the stench didn't get to the house, except perhaps in the summer. But his father-in-law, the Ox King, had tried explaining earlier that marriage was about trying to appease the other person. So, with the knowledge that Chi-Chi wouldn't want to use that bush outside, he pointed to a dusty pail sitting on the floor and suggested, "You could use that."

Chi-Chi's figure slumped to the side as she glared at the innocent, rusty bucket sitting on the floor. With her hand gripping on to the back of a wooden chair, she shook her head and said, "There's no way, Goku, that I'm going to go in that thing." She had enough dignity to not have to squat over the little bucket every morning with hopes that she wouldn't knock it over. She was the daughter of a king, and such an idea repulsed her. "I'd rather go in the bush than in that."

Goku frowned, unable to understand why she was so picky. A place to go was a place to go, but not according to Chi-Chi. She could only grimace as she looked around, dusting her hands together and finding out that they didn't have a sink, either. The room was so terribly unclean that Chi-Chi couldn't wait until the morning. But she had to remember that the night was her wedding night, and she couldn't spend it worrying about the inconveniences of their new home. No, she was supposed to be spending it with Goku, though as she looked at the bed, she realized that it was merely a blanket strewn across two poles. She winced, Goku following her exhausted gaze as she turned away. "What's wrong?" he asked, standing up from the bed in question. But she refused to face him, even as he placed his hand on her small shoulder, succeeding in getting dust all over the precious wedding dress.

Heavily disheartened by her dreams having exceeded reality, she walked to the door and opened it, escaping from the clustered house. Goku followed at her steps as she breathed in relief, glad to get dust out of her lungs. She breathed in deeply and walked a little ways away from the building, standing in a clearing beside it. Then she sighed and clumped her silky dress into her hands, taking it off the ground before she reached down to touch the ground. The last thing she wanted was to sit down in a large mud puddle in the wedding dress that had been passed on for generations in the family, ruining all of her father's efforts to preserve it. To her fortune, however, the ground was hard and dry, as though it hadn't rained for at least a week in this place. So she gathered the folds of her dress in her arms and sat down on the ground, distressed by reality.

Goku had told her a few weeks before that he had a home and that it would need some fixing up, but this? This was ridiculous! She was considered royalty, and though Goku might disagree, nobody was fit to live under such rugged conditions. It looked as if her father would have to contribute some funds for them to either build a new house or practically demolish the already existing one, though she thought that with the memories of his grandfather the place held, Goku would be against the latter choice.

And this was their wedding night, with no place to sleep. She would have suggested heading back to her father's castle, at least for the night, but the place was in shambles from that fire. There would be no privacy there, with all of the carpenters out and about, trying to restore the castle to its former beauty. She looked at Goku, who had sat down next to her, his legs crossed and his hands in his lap, looking rather like an uncertain child. So, trying to decide where to go from there, she decided to ask, "What do you want to do, Goku? It is our wedding night, after all..."

She leaned up against him, her cocked head resting against his shoulder. But Goku only turned his eyes upward ambivalently, looking at the stars beginning to show in the changing sky, so pink at one end, so dark at the other. He dropped his shoulders, about to admit that he had no idea, but then his stomach came to the rescue. The infamous growl resounded through the area, and he placed a hand to the perpetrator. He looked at Chi-Chi resting against him and declared, "I'm hungry."

Chi-Chi moaned, darting her eyes up at her new husband. Was that all he ever thought about? Most men would have other plans for a wedding night, but not Goku, she feared. And she was only further awakened to this realization as Goku stood up abruptly, making her fall over and into the earth. She sat back up straight again, brushing dirt out of her face and veil, only to see Goku looming over her with his hands on his hips. "I'm going to go catch something to eat. Anything in mind?"

She only let out an irritated groan, something he took as a no. So he started running off towards the woods until Chi-Chi called, "Goku, wait!" He stopped at the edge of the clearing, turning back to her with a confused expression. This night was not going as she wanted it to, not at all how she had expected it. Of all the nights for her to abandon him for food, she hadn't expected this one. She had been hoping that, perhaps, he would want to stay in bed with her, though that brought her around to remembering that this place lacked a bed, or at least one big enough for the two of them. That still didn't deter her want for him to stay there with him, so she yelled with her hands cupped over her mouth, "Don't go!"

Goku only laughed, "I'll be right back!" And then he disappeared among the trees, leaving her to herself on her wedding night.

Chi-Chi stared at the spot he vanished from in defeat, dropping her hands back to her side. She spit a strand of hair out of her mouth before standing up, her eyes unable to tear themselves away from the spot that he had left. Then, angrily, she pulled the wedding tiara out of her hair and threw it to the ground, storming inside. She would clean off that cot and sleep on it, making him pay by forcing him to sleep on the ground.

But it had been only fifteen minutes of lying in that dusty cot, having been too fatigued to beat it out, that she noticed a bright flash of light in the window. She jerked her head up, her watery eyes analyzing the situation. Was Goku back already?

Still lying on her stomach on that bed, she wiped her hands against her tear-stained face, smearing her makeup job even further. Her crying ended in a round of sniffles as she rolled off of the bed and clumsily on to her feet, rubbing at her red nose indignantly. She walked towards the window and looked out, only to see that the red light was coming from the back of the house, where there was no convenient window to look out of. She huffed, gathering her dress into her arms again as she walked out of the front door.

She hurried around the side of the house, trying to do so with dignity but failing, her hair disheveled and her makeup streaked. She turned her nose to the air, unwilling to let Goku see how weak she was at the moment. But her proud march soon became a pathetic crawl, one in which she crept up to the backside of the house, peeking her head around it to see who it was. But the first thing she saw was a gruesome sight, a wolf with a spit through it, hanging over a couple of rocks and a blazing fire. Then she noticed Goku standing off to the side, looking over his handiwork with a smile. He noticed Chi-Chi's ki and waved at her, wondering just what she was doing hiding off behind the house.

Chi-Chi pulled herself out of her hiding place, it being too late for her to simply return to that bed and try to fall asleep. So she turned her face to the sky again, strutting out with only her dress and pride. Goku laughed at the sight, making Chi-Chi blush a little as she asked, "What's so funny?"

"Your face!" he said like in a childlike tone, though Chi-Chi could feel her heart's beating quicken. Her face?

"What's wrong with my face?" she asked, suddenly feeling self-conscious. This was her wedding night, and something was wrong with her face? She didn't care that it was just Goku to see her - in fact, that bothered her more. She felt at it, feeling nothing strange at all, but the look of laughter on her husband's face suggested something different. "Do you have any water around here?" She could use the reflection to look over herself, her mind on edge. What was wrong?

"Sure," Goku said, a last look towards the roasting wolf before approaching her, putting his hands on her shoulders and guiding her out of the clearing and through the forest. They only walked a short way before Chi-Chi saw a rapid river of water. She kneeled before it, realizing that water this fast wouldn't help her. She couldn't see herself with water this quick, though Goku helped her by adding, "You have stuff all over it. You look funny."

Chi-Chi lowered her hands into the water in an attempt to rub whatever was on it off. But as she sank her hands into the river's greedy mouth, it dragged the rest of her in, too. Goku watched in awe as his wife was pulled by the river, yelling whenever she could come up for air. But she tumbled through it and down a small waterfall before Goku reacted, jumping over and grabbing her by the hand. And as soon as she was out, her perfect hair damp and floppy, her family's wedding dress soaking and chilling her to the bone, all Goku could say was, "At least that stuff's off of your face!"

Chi-Chi snarled at her beaming husband, gathering her heavy dress and lifting it off the ground with one hand as she waved a fist through the air. "Goku!" was all that could escape through her mouth, a cry of distress and anger. Goku looked down at his wife's face, clean of the makeup he had been referring to earlier, and could only smile nervously now. He knew he had messed up somehow, so he scooped her into his arms, leaping across the river again and back to the house.

Within another fifteen minutes, Chi-Chi was wrapped up in only the blanket that had once served as a hammock, shivering before the fire. Goku had taken down the blanket for her to use and had left her, deciding that she probably wanted to be alone at that moment. But she couldn't help but flush from humiliation, unable to believe that out of any night to have this happen to her, it had to be that night. She had felt utter humiliation as he left the small house and left her to change in privacy.

She stared at the large figure, turning the large stick with the wolf with one hand. It surprised her that he had construed something of this efficiency, the spit being a large tree branch stuck through the wolf's length, perched on to larger branches with forked ends that he had planted into the ground. And then there were rocks scattered below it, a safety precaution for the fire blazing on the smaller sticks he had managed to pick up. She sighed, placing her cheek in her palm as she leaned forward on the ground. His Grandpa Gohan had certainly taught him a lot, though he still had a lot to learn.

Goku turned around towards her with his face twisted in vexation. He couldn't understand why she looked so upset. Sure, she had just fallen into a river, but he thought that women loved taking baths. Apparently he was wrong though, with that look of confusion on her face. He gulped a little, startled as she suddenly asked, "Goku, how do I look?"

He clenched his teeth, wondering if this was a trick question of some sort. Master Roshi had taught him long ago that women were filled with these, trying to get men to say things they didn't really mean. So, trying to stay on the careful side, Goku drew his face into the most enthusiastic smile he could at that moment and said, "You look nice!"

The deadened look in her eyes immediately told him that this was the wrong answer. With a crestfallen expression, she asked, "Just nice?" She shook her head, unable to believe that it was her wedding night, and Goku could only say that she looked nice. Marriage really wasn't what she had expected.

The man watched as she turned away from him, huddled into a ball in that dusty blanket he had used as a bed so long ago. Not so naive as to ignore these warning signs the Turtle Hermit had informed him of so many years ago, Goku added, "You're pretty, too!" He jumped back a step, though, as Chi-Chi turned her head back towards him, the bags under her eyes suggesting the opposite. So it wasn't Chi-Chi's best moment, but he still couldn't understand why she was so upset. Was it really the way that she looked?

Goku approached Chi-Chi after she spun her head back around, resting it face-flat in the bundle of covers and trying to ignore the dust. She flinched as Goku placed a firm hand on her shoulder, kneeling down to her level. "Chi, what's wrong?" he asked, deciding to avert his attention from their meal to tend to his wife's needs. Women sure were needy, as he found out.

Chi-Chi planted her face in her hands, bawling, "Everything!" Goku could only release a small breath of a chuckle at that, unable to see what was bothering her. But, before he could even ask, she elaborated, "When you said you had a house in the woods, I thought it would be a real house, not a little, rundown shack. And then you told me that you had no bathroom, and there's no bed for us, and I fell in a river, and we're eating wolf, and..." She couldn't continue, ending her short rant with a few sniffles. But Goku immediately brightened.

"Wolf tastes really good!" he informed her, relieved that she was upset by such little things. She wiped the forming tears from her eyes with the blanket, quieting as she listened to her husband. "And at least you won't have to worry about showering for another few weeks! And look, we can just lay here and fall asleep. Grandpa Gohan had a nice rug that we might use as a pillow, and if I can't find that, we can always use the pillow I put my Grandpa's lucky Dragon Ball on." And then, after digging his hand into his pant pocket, he pulled out the shiny orb, its four stars glinting with the fire light, glimmering with the same twinkle as those distant stars in the sky.

With a hint of a smile on her weary face, she asked, "Do you carry that thing around with you everywhere?"

Her husband nodded, handing it over to her so that she could examine it more closely. It was beautiful, she couldn't deny. The orange sphere shone with the reflection of the fire, its red stars sparkling as she stared in to them. But then she felt Goku lift his hand off of her shoulder, leaving the spot cold even with the blanket over her. He gingerly cupped his hands around hers, allowing her fingers to encase the Dragon Ball, wrapping around it completely. And with a smile, an arm around his wife, he said, "But I want to give it to you. I want you to do something with it, because it's not just mine and my Grandpa's. It's yours, too."

Chi-Chi's face trembled a little, the smile on her face feeling foreign after that night's events. She let her eyes rest on the orb for a little longer before leaning to her side to lean against her husband, but he was gone in a flash, leaving her to collapse on the ground again. She sat back up, grabbing the blanket around her protectively as she twisted her body around to look at Goku. He was turning the wolf around using the spit, chuckling, "Sorry, I could smell it burning."

The woman simply set her jaw in place, staring down at the Dragon Ball in her hands. She hated to admit it, but Goku's optimism was contagious. There was something about him that made her realize that this marriage would work, and there was hope for the young couple. Certainly, she would have to visit her father with Goku the next morning and beg for plumbing, but she couldn't be bothered to do so tonight. It was their wedding night, after all, and though it hadn't turned out exactly as planned, she couldn't help but let out a small laugh as Goku examined their dinner and exclaimed, "It's coming along!"

Tomorrow, she would insist that she be the one to prepare dinner. She would talk to him about that little tendency of his to abandon her at random times. She would lecture him over his bathroom habits. She would yell at him for not understanding her emotions. But tonight, she would let her husband do as he wanted, as it was their wedding night.


End file.
